Thursday 7/30/20
I weep, but with a strength. I have unholy monoliths to overcome, and I don't know how I will overcome that which I must, I only believe I will. I am about to finish composing a story called "Appendages Lateral," which is about an old man, a ten-year-old girl, and three leaves on a lawn, and it is as powerful as anything I have ever created. It is also the fifth full short story of the week. After four last week. I am sutured together, by my own hand, and yet I feel so strong, which I attribute to new powers emerging within me once again as an artist. I feel the molting as it happens. The corollary is that as I get better, this gets worse, the arms of the closed circle lock tighter, if that is even possible. It may not be. The effect is the same, though. But last night I was greatly inspired. I watched, for the first time in a long time, Bresson's 1956 film, A Man Escaped. It is about a good man in the French Resistance unjustly imprisoned by evil people--Nazis, in this case. The imprisoned man admits that his courage has faltered and he has wept, but he searches for the courage, he finds it again, he exists with a sense of purpose that no one else around him can understand. At his barred window, high above the prison courtyard below, he has a conversation with his neighbor in the adjoining cell, who knows that this man works only towards escape. He hears him scraping at his door in the night with a spoon. And the neighbor says there is no chance, there is hope, he must give up, what is the point? And the man who knows only purpose, says, "I battle the door" and it was just about the most profound thing I have ever heard anyone say. I battle the door. I battle the fucking door. He gets out, incidentally, in the end.
